Today's track: Here's Your Future — The Thermals

Nine hundred and fourteen percent.

That's how much college tuition has gone up since 1983. Not adjusted for anything. Just up.

The promise was simple: go to school, get the degree, get the stable job. Borrow whatever it takes — it'll be worth it.

And now the companies hiring for those stable jobs are cutting by the tens of thousands.

I've been looking at the layoff numbers for March and April. The list is long:

Oracle: 10,000–30,000 cuts. Meta: 8,000+. Microsoft rolling out voluntary buyouts — roughly 7% of their entire U.S. workforce. Snap cut 1,000 people — 16% of their headcount. Nike: 1,400. GoPro let go of 145 people, which is 23% of the whole company.

In 2026 so far: 249 layoff events. Nearly 96,000 tech workers. That's 864 people a day, every single day — up 40% from last year.

These aren't small companies stumbling. These are the names on the posters in every university career center for the last twenty years.

Here's what I keep coming back to though — this isn't a jobs apocalypse.

The World Economic Forum projects AI will create 170 million new roles by 2030 while displacing 92 million. Net positive: 78 million jobs. Only about a quarter of all roles face high automation risk.

But nearly 40% of the skills required at work today will need to change.

That last number is the one that matters.

It's not a massacre. It's a migration.

The people getting wiped out are the ones doing predictable, rule-based work behind a screen. The people winning are the ones doing things a machine genuinely cannot fake.

Showing up in a room. Reading the situation. Building trust over years in a specific neighborhood.

The credential alone was never the protection people thought it was. Showing up — really showing up, with skin in the game and presence — that's always been the moat. We just forgot for a while.

I hear a lot of people right now asking: what will the children do?

They're watching automation touch their own jobs and starting to wonder if the path they're building for their kids even leads anywhere.

My answer is pretty simple — let them run wild.

Expose them to everything. Science, math, art, music, sports. The things that feel a little different. The events they might not gravitate to on their own. They'll never know what fits until they actually check it out.

I'm convinced there will always be a future for the person who is genuinely obsessed with their niche — whatever it is. Enthusiasm is hard to automate. Deep interest compounds. Let your kids find the thing that makes them forget to eat lunch, and then encourage the hell out of it.

And here's the thing nobody's saying enough: an 18-year-old today is more empowered than any 18-year-old in history.

People with creativity and a little ingenuity are launching businesses right now — uber successful ones — because they picked up AI and actually ran with it. The tools are there. The barrier is basically gone. All you need is the niche insight from your own life and the willingness to apply it.

I think about all those kids smoking weed in their basements with clever ideas. Where would those ideas have gone if they too had AI to flesh them out with?

Good thing we are empowered now and don't have to let ideas die on the vine.

Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

PS: What are you doubling down on in this new frontier? Hit reply — I’m genuinely curious.

PSS: If real estate is part of your answer — here are Winner Realty’s current listings.

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